CF8 Fails After Turning on Monitoring

Yep, uisng the monitor on CF8 with Vista Business or WebServer 2008 kills the service.... nice... especially at 2am witha deadline... nice...

I had turned on debugging and threw the switch on monitoring as well while I was at it. Boom. Server goes down.

The exact error I was getting was this:

Windows could not start the ColdFusion 8 Application Server on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code 2.

I checked the cf logs: nada. Only thing it showed is it died after getting the monitor service started the first time. All subsequent attempts, even after rebooting, died just before logging that the monitor service starts.

So I figured it was the monitoring, and the trick was to find the xml config file to turn it back off.

I found C:\ColdFusion8\lib\neo-monitoring.xml and C:\ColdFusion8\lib\neo-debug.xml figuring it was one of those two.

Neo-monitoring.xml looked like the settings for monitoring, but no setting to turn monitoring service itself off or on.

The setting for the monitoring service startup is in neo-metric.xml. The CFSTAT is set to true. I tried setting it to false. No go.

So now I start searching to see. Putting the actual error message above is what found a thread that helped. Logical searches like 'Monitoring kills CF8 server' or 'ColdFusion 8 dies when I turn on monitoring' yielded spurious results.

Here is what helped me fix it. I had found these settings but I did not know what to change them to. Deleting the whole CFSTAT entry does the trick.